Walking around Debra Newell’s apartment, I can easily tell she is a woman of means. The furniture is high-end, the fabrics lush, and the closets—crammed with pristine garments and a designer-handbag vault—are grand enough to satisfy Carrie Bradshaw. Only the lights and cameras poised outside the windows remind me that this is the set of Dirty John, a scripted TV series based on the popular true-crime podcast of the same name.

Dirty John was a sensation among true-crime enthusiasts when it first ran in 2017. Based on the reporting of the Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Goffard, it tells the story of Newell, a California businesswoman and single mom who fell in love with John Meehan, a seemingly charming man whose shady secrets eventually shatter her life. Listening to the podcast, show-runner Alexandra Cunningham, who has now adapted the series for Bravo, saw potential for more.

“It’s this amazing work of investigative journalism . . . but it doesn’t necessarily put you inside the heads of the people who were living this experience,” Cunningham says. “It was the sort of factual account of all the insane stuff that went down once these people got together, but there wasn’t that sense of why, from the inside. And that’s where scripted really gets to shine—you get to project yourself into these stories through the actors.”

Premiering this month, Dirty John is part of a flood of TV projects—Homecoming, Alice Isn’t Dead, Limetown, Sandra, Bronzeville, Dr. Death, and more—that got their start as podcasts, following on the heels of existing podcasts turned shows such as Lore and Alex, Inc. Hollywood has fallen madly in love with the format—and not just because everyone here spends so much time in transit glued to the car speakers. In the era of peak TV, studios are starving for content, and podcasts represent a tantalizing source of intellectual property with established fan bases on which to build shows.

In the last year, networks’ interest in the medium has skyrocketed, according to CAA agent Jacquie Katz. “They are so hungry for things that are unique, and so hungry for existing properties that already have a fan base. It’s not a book. It’s not a movie that we are trying to remake. It’s not a TV show that went off the air between 3 and 50 years ago,” she says with a chuckle. “It is actually something different.”

When Katz started working with podcasting clients three or four years ago, entertainment executives were deeply skeptical, she says. “Now a podcast will come out and shoot to No. 1 in the charts, and all of a sudden I will get incoming calls left and right from producers, directors, big-name writers, and high-level executives saying, ‘What is this thing, and can we get our hands on it immediately?’” Hollywood’s major talent agencies now have reps focused on this market; Endeavor recently created a special division called Endeavor Audio dedicated to developing, distributing, and marketing podcasts.

In an era when most of us spend our days toggling between multiple screens, podcasts whisk us into another world, usually via headphones or the mobile cocoon of one’s car. “You have to reach a pretty high bar for somebody to just want to focus on something in this A.D.D. world,” says Elise Henderson, a senior vice president at Universal Cable Productions, the studio behind Dirty John, Alice Isn’t Dead, and Bronzeville.

The trend is reaching something of a critical mass with Dirty John and Amazon’s Homecoming. Based on the popular podcast of the same name, and directed by Mr. Robot mastermind Sam Esmail, Homecoming is a conspiracy thriller about a facility treating soldiers returning to civilian life. With a cast that includes Julia Roberts, Bobby Cannavale, and Sissy Spacek, the series dropped on Amazon on November 2 as the highest-profile podcast-to-TV adaptation yet.

Eli Horowitz, co-creator of the original podcast and now co-writer of the TV version, has been looking for novel ways to tell tales since the early 2000s, when he began working for McSweeney’s. Horowitz says, “The way we approached the Homecoming podcast was very much ‘What’s the best kind of story that will take advantage of the opportunities of the audio form and avoid the limitations, or find interesting ways to overcome those limitations?’”

In 2015, Horowitz began working with Gimlet Studios to create narrative content for its network. He joined forces with veteran production-sound mixer Micah Bloomberg, who says he came to Homecoming as someone who “spent all day listening to people talk” for a living. That buzz of eavesdropping on mundane chatter became central to Homecoming, allowing the show to capture what Horowitz calls “the indirect weird hiccups of natural human conversation.” Over two seasons, the podcast crisscrossed narrative and chronological threads, enticing listeners to immerse themselves in the characters’ disturbing journeys and their oddball sensibilities.

In lives spent toggling between screens, podcasts whisk us into another world.

“It’s a great testing ground [for ideas] a little bit outside of the mainstream,” Bloomberg says. They recorded the first six episodes of Homecoming (with actors Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, and David Schwimmer) in four days. “You can get actors to come in and, with a comparatively small amount of money, just make the story,” Bloomberg continues.

Now the pair are working with Esmail to translate their aural vision into a rich televisual environment, while maintaining its theatrical emphasis on human interaction and eccentricity. “Eli and Micah were sort of the perfect pair for Sam because their attention to detail from a sound perspective almost mirrors how attentive to detail he is from a visual perspective,” Henderson says. Esmail specifically looked for ways to layer in visual cues, like subtly dousing the show’s two time frames with different hues and presenting them in different aspect ratios.

There is no surefire correlation between podcast popularity and TV success, as proven by ABC’s cancellation earlier this year of Alex, Inc., one of the first network comedies inspired by an audio series. But the transition between mediums can offer the chance to take a work in new directions. Kyle Bradstreet, who is creating a TV version of podcast Alice Isn’t Dead for USA Network and Universal Cable Productions, says he fell in love with the original because it combined the charms of an old radio play and the risk-taking of contemporary prestige TV. The spooky, fictional story revolves around narrator Keisha, a woman driving across America in search of her missing wife; the lonely journey throws her into conflict with malign, nightmarish forces.

“But to work as a TV series, the story needed a larger visual world to play in—more characters, more time with those characters, new locations, and a different pacing,” Bradstreet says. “The ultimate goal was to make these changes while keeping the anxiety and the eeriness of the podcast.”

Cunningham’s work adapting Dirty John into a scripted series was slightly complicated by the fact that the story involves real people, most of whom are still alive. While listening to the podcast, many fans wondered how someone like Debra Newell could be taken in by a slimeball like John, and why she didn’t listen to her adult daughters’ warnings. The TV series, which stars Connie Britton as Debra and Eric Bana as John, can show events as the openhearted fiftysomething Debra perceived them: as a Nancy Meyers rom-com rather than a horrifying cautionary tale. “What I get to do is to have Eric Bana stare into your eyes and tell you you’re the most amazing, beautiful, special woman on earth,” Cunningham says. “I kind of defy you to go, ‘Meh, I wouldn’t fall for that!’ It removes some of that distance that enables people to think that it couldn’t happen to them.”

Cunningham says it all crystallized for her when she and a small crew flew to Vegas to shoot the scene in which Debra and John elope. When you listen to the podcast, Debra seems crazy for marrying him after having known him for just a few months, she says.

But watching the actors, Cunningham saw “this wonderful, fun woman who thought she was never going to find love again, who has a void in her life shaped exactly like this man. It’s all laughter and romance, and I was just like: I now understand everything about why this happened.”

The podcast feeding frenzy isn’t likely to end soon. The danger now may be that podcasting is treated as a farm system or launchpad for TV and movie projects—a way to create proof of concept and build an audience that will attract nervous, risk-averse entertainment executives. The best podcasts (especially scripted ones) create something fresh by making the most of the medium.

“You are working in a vacuum, and you have to heighten everything else because of it,” Katz says. “When you get the great material is when you are focusing on saying, ‘This is going to make a hell of a podcast.’”